dance through life

Miscellaneous Nonsense

May 29, 2018

Mr. P & I went on vacation to the Mendocino coast. While there, we visited Ft. Bragg, the location of the public Glass Beach and the private Sea Glass Museum. At the museum, I found this little original oil painting, which came home with us to live in our kitchen.

I will probably give that frame a gray glaze at some point, to better match the frame of the picture hung below it. But for now, I like it just fine.

March 03, 2018

Or not so minor, I guess. Recently my primary credit card was reissued - they sent me the new "improved" version with features I don't need and didn't ask for - and I had to update all kinds of account information, because I have various things - including my domain name and this blog! - set to charge that card for renewals, etc.

Anyway, so I had to update all that crap.

AND THEN that card was compromised. Some lowlife tried to buy $4000 worth of airline tickets. The card issuer flagged and denied the charge, but the card had to be cancelled and a new one sent. Because Mr. P and I were sequentially sick for two weeks, it took a while to get the new card.

Once finally received and activated, I now have to update all my account information again. This is, my friends, annoying.

In other annoying news, my wireless mouse is acting weird. Specifically, sometimes it works perfectly and sometimes it just doesn't work at all. Maybe all it needs is a new battery. I will try that, but meanwhile, I'm annoyed.

In NON-annoying news, we have had several days with significant rainfall, and it's raining again right this second, and because a certain old cat woke me up at six o'clock I have already cleaned and refilled the hummingbird feeder, so my little beauties don't have to be wet AND cold AND hungry.

January 30, 2018

So, the weekend of my birthday a West Coast outpost of the Italian-food marketplace called Eataly opened up right across the street from my office building. I didn't get into it until last week, when I was over there visiting my bank and thought "this is a fine time to get a bottle of wine to go with dinner."

I have to tell you ... I'm disappointed.

I love Italian food. I would rather eat Italian food than anything else, even sushi, and would happily do so every night if someone else would cook it for me. But I will not be regularly shopping at Eataly, and here are the two main reasons why:

the things they sell are not things I can only get there. I can get fish, meat, cheese, pastries, wine, pasta, gelato, and cappuccino at countless other locations, and there are dozens of good Italian restaurants in Los Angeles;

the place has all the aesthetic appeal of a bus station.

This seems to me like an enormous missed opportunity. If I were designing an Italian-food marketplace, it would not open its doors on white floors, white walls, stainless-steel everything, and displays blocking the passages. It would also be a damn sight easier to find a cash register at which to hand over money.

But let's focus on the design. What would I have done? I would have started by - if not outright hiring some Disney Imagineers - prowling the Disney markets and fooderies because those people Do Design. If you go to a German restaurant at Epcot, it darned well looks like Germany. Mexican restaurant? Ole! The food may not be the most "authentic," but most food purveyors will tell you that does not matter. What matters is the experience. An appealing food-related experience does not happen in a mashup of a supermarket and a generic food court.

I've never been to Italy - yet - but I've seen plenty of movies and TV shows (hello, "The Wine Show," new episodes pleez) set there, and it is beautiful. It is warm, it is colorful, it is full of flowers and sculpture and light that does not say "I belong in a clinic."

So my Italian-food marketplace would have been imagineered to look like a genuine Italian village, with narrow but unobstructed "streets" winding between tiny storefronts on the "inside" and places to buy prepared foods on the "outside." Each storefront would actually have a store behind it, one where you could go in and browse for your dry or fresh pasta, or your galaxy of cheeses. The ventilation would be very very good (I am not likely to buy cheese or pastry when all I can smell is fish). There would be plants and fountains.

The place to sit and eat your prepared food, if you are not taking it home, would be on an easily-accessible mezzanine or balcony, with either an outside view or (since here in L.A. that outside view would encompass primarily eight lanes of traffic) aforesaid plants and fountains. The place to eat would NOT be out in the middle of a grocery store.

And I would employ curves, because in garden design they tell you that a curved path conveys a sense of anticipation and discovery ... whereas a straight path just points you at the end. A straight corridor in a shop says "this way to your stuff, now get out." A straight corridor, moreover, that is a dead end is an abomination.

They should have put the wine shop in an enclosed space (A SHOP) off to the right behind that restaurant. That way, when you go into the wine shop, you expect to have to exit the shop and go back the way you came. And the tasting bar would not be out in the open space that is REDOLENT OF FISH.

The Eataly marketplace has every genre of food separated, which maybe is convenient for stocking, or if you only go in for pasta or a pastry or a bottle of wine. But to me, going in past the pastry shop and walking through a modest selection of produce while off to the side is a seating area and beyond that is the charcuterie and the pasta (and whatever else; I didn't bother looking), meanwhile fish and meat are past the produce across from a salad bar and then there is wine taking up a large area at the end of which there is a restaurant ... I did not find it fun to explore. I found it congested and illogical and annoying. And having had that annoying first experience, I am just not likely to go back.

May 04, 2017

I subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle this year, and one of the features I regularly visit is the real-estate listings, because they are endlessly fascinating. As a longtime armchair home designer, I have opinions about everything. Here are two views from a house that was on the market for well north of a million dollars.

First, the kitchen. This ... makes me sad.

So what's so bad?

First: granite that looks like vomit.

Second: floor that matches the granite.

Third: rug that ties them both together, and not in a good way.

Fourth: "French Country" cabinetry with a pink tint that looks like the biofilm in a pet's water dish that hasn't been rinsed often enough.

Fifth: Tuscan-style tile picture above the range. (Note: such a tile accent can work quite beautifully on a tile wall. On a slab of stainless steel it looks ... expensively ridiculous.)

Seventh: random glassware placed by the sink in a transparent and unsuccessful attempt to "tie together" the tile inset and the pendants.

And finally, eighth: beige light switch and outlet plates. They clash with the wall color and look cheap. This is the kind of thing I never understand: you spend many thousands of dollars on custom cabinets and then screw on the 50-cent switchplates? There are quite nice metal-finished ones on the shelf at Lowe's.

And ... is that a fake plant over the window?!?

But I would forgive all of the manifest sins in this kitchen because of this (in the same house's basement):

March 26, 2017

January 21, 2017

The cat floof is collected in a bag in the kitchen. Mr. P claimed he didn't know where I stash it. :-)

Here's a question. I have five little pine-needle baskets. One is purple, the others are natural with just touches of color, except that one in the back that is all natural and more rustic. I am inclined to ... touch it up a little.

August 19, 2016

June 07, 2016

This is a short piece for the Flash Fiction challenge at terribleminds.com. Inspired by true events. :-)

MAP QUEST

It was a measure of the catastrophe that, at the moment, the easiest thing to tackle looked like the old two-drawer file cabinet. If anything was bound to be disposable, surely it would be in there. They’d been through twenty years’ worth of records already and kept so infuriatingly few bits and pieces. She needed a quick win, something that could go OUT without so much consideration and angst.

She turned away from the eighteen milk crates and twenty-plus cardboard cartons full of books, away from the shelves loaded with rusting tools and boxes of who-knows-what, away from the trash bags full of old household linens that “someone might want,” and levered open the top drawer.

It was full of maps. Automobile Club of California maps. Dozens of maps.

Easy, right?

She started pulling them out. Like everything else, they had to go into empty boxes, boxes that had already held multiple iterations of outgoing stuff. God forbid they just hand the whole file cabinet over to 1-800-GOT-JUNK without going through it. God forbid this was the place the old man had hidden something that was actually important. They’d looked at every single piece of paper going out so far, why stop now.

Unfortunately, she loved maps. As much as she loved books, which made it harder to throw away these maps than she expected. But there were so many versions. It was as if the old man had gotten new maps every time they left the city, and had kept every single one from every single trip.

Where had they been going, and why? Did he get a new map for every county or city they’d be driving through on a given trip? Maybe so; she’d been known to do that herself. You never knew when you’d want to dive off the freeway and go exploring.

Before she realized it she had started her own small collection of the oldest versions of each city map. As she dug deeper, as the drawer emptied, as she moved to the bottom drawer, the versions got older and older. Did she really want that city? What about this one? Why the hell was she doing this?

Los Angeles before the 405 freeway was constructed? Well, that was a frame-worthy artifact. But Santa Rosa in 1958?

Well … why not? What would happen if she actually went up there with this map? Would the city be negotiable, at all, using it?

When the cabinet was emptied, nothing “important” had been found, and she had ruthlessly cut down her own gleanings to three: the 1960 Los Angeles map, 1958 Santa Rosa, and 1954 Sacramento.

She’d never been to Sacramento. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere they’d ever been except that time they drove to Seattle. And then they didn’t stop there, just went around it and kept going.

Santa Rosa she’d been through. It was pretty much destroyed now by the ever-expanding freeways. She thought there was no chance the old map would get her anywhere; she would give it to the cousin they liked, who lived there. It would be Sacramento.

Could they go the next day? They’d been working nonstop for a week. The husband didn’t want to go. He had too much to do. The clean-out stopped when she wasn’t there, but the catching-up and the fixing-up and the dealing with a neverending cascade of emergencies never stopped.

He was being hit with ten years of Business Not Dealt With and taking an exploratory road trip didn’t sound like fun. She should go, though. He had to go back to IKEA for a proper file cabinet, one that locked, so that the financially-revealing records that they didn’t want the rest of the family to mess around with - the family who had been in and out of the house for the last five years without mentioning, maybe without noticing, that things were going to hell - could be secured. He would take his mother’s car, and she could use theirs. When she got back she could tell him all about it. It was a day’s round trip, no more, and she’d been working like a mule. Have fun and drive safe.

Okay. She would leave after morning rush hour, and wouldn’t waste time once she got there. Not too much time anyway. She would be home for dinner, or she would call him to let him know she’d be later. There was always the chance she’d actually get lost, since her phone didn’t have GPS and the Thomas Guide in their car was ten years old. She made sure the phone was fully charged before she left.

Getting across the Bay was no more than usually awful. She didn’t love the bridge, and the highway through Berkeley was as horrible as a highway could be. She was tempted to get off and regroup on Muir Parkway, but reminded herself that she promised not to waste time. She drove on.

When she got to Vallejo, she did pull off. Did the old map cover that? Glory be, it did. Should she cheat? Should she look at the Thomas Guide to check where the correspondences were? Or should she trust the old map? Surely the old map’s road numbers were still the road numbers. She used the Guide to make sure that the now-freeway existed on the old map, and carried on.

She was driving outside time, through a landscape that surely bore little resemblance to its fifty-years-ago existence. She had memorized the next two turns, and got off the freeway where the old map told her to.

The next two roads were small, mostly straight, with numerous traffic signals where - she was sure - there had been none in 1954. According to the map she was still a good distance from the city. But almost out of nowhere came strip malls and shopping centers, and side streets that clearly contained housing developments. The city had come to her well in advance of itself.

The next turn wasn’t there anymore. She had to stop and pull off again, and look for a workaround route to try to find the road that used to exist. It just wasn't there. She needed a break. There was no longer a country road to Sacramento, but there was a Starbucks.

April 14, 2016

Our little black cat, formerly plump and plushy, has been diagnosed with kidney disease and we can't get her to gain weight for anything. So whatever she asks for, she generally gets. In this case, Mr. P's raw milk (which she will basically attack him for).

These are the image files for each of my published works of fiction.
The L.A. Stories (currently twelve separate novellas) are available singly for Kindle and Kindle apps from Amazon.com; and collected 3 at a time in paperback or e-book editions, also from Amazon.
The L.A. Stories are being reworked and will be republished as completed, in e-book and paperback formats.
The four full-length novels are available for both Kindle and paperback formats.